


Now that's what i call CREEK Volume 69

by CaptainDude (HandbagMurder)



Series: South Park one shots [3]
Category: South Park
Genre: Angst, Anthology, Filthy Shenanigans, Guilty Pleasures, M/M, Masturbation, On-Camera Masturbation, One-Sided Attraction, Oral Sex, PWP, Panty Kink, Sex General, Sex Toys, Sex Work, This has very little to do with any actual fictional relationship, Voyeurism, bottom!Craig, oh boy, tbh when it comes to porn one characters name is as good as any other, top!Tweek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-29 07:28:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3887536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandbagMurder/pseuds/CaptainDude
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of the creek stuff i write when i am not writing stuff i should be writing instead.</p><p>ANTHOLOGY FIC. Single chapter stories only.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Panty gnomes aren’t actually a thing that exists (so I guess that’s something you have going for you)

**Author's Note:**

> this is disgusting tbh.

Craig sits in math class drawing buildings in the back of his exercise book.

He always starts with the windows, and then does the bricks, and he builds his houses from the inside out until they are completed little blocks with pointed rooves and a distinctly rigid air about them, and sometimes around the margins of his pages he practices drawing knuckles, and sensual women with long legs and large breasts, and fancy bras and camisoles so that anyone peeking over his shoulder would suspect he is a person who never has sex far from his mind. In actual fact, he isn’t paying attention to what he is drawing at all - he is thinking about how hungry he is. How he is hot and uncomfortable in the stuffy classroom even though it is snowing outside. He is sucking on his back teeth and under the table, without knowing it, he keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs. The action seems to be irritating his deskmate but he doesn’t notice until Tweek inhales deeply and places his pen down on the table in front of him.

“You keep kicking me.” He says.

Craig stops drawing and gives him a look which is just as flat and disinterested as he feels.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Tweek flushes and turns his eyes down to the table. It’s kind of cute, how he can’t look Craig in the eye any more because it makes him flustered. Craig takes a moment to study his profile and the way his hair falls on his face, and he thinks quite randomly that he wants to touch it. To feel it in his fingers thick and wavy and kind of course at the ends. He wants to touch the high points on his cheeks and know that there is bone under there, and he wants to slide his thumb between Tweek’s lips and press his nail against the smooth hardness of his incisors. When he feels a twinge of longing he realises what his problem is.

He is distracted and he is numb, and he is tired of this bland old room in a bland old school right now.

“I’m kind of out of it today.”

“Mm. Same I guess.” Tweek picks up his pen and brings it to his mouth. He’s always been notorious for chewing on pens, and Craig is a little hypnotised by way they sound as they crack against the enamel on his teeth.

“Want to wag fifth?” He whispers, quiet enough so that no one else can hear them over the teacher droning. Tweek nods and slides down in his seat. As though just _agreeing_ might be enough to get him in trouble.

Craig can’t wait until the end of class bell, when the two of them can duck out of the school back gate and escape into the safety of Tweek’s bedroom. His parents aren’t home so there are no uncomfortable questions or surprise interruptions – they dart up stairs like fugitives and as soon as they get to Tweek’s room the door is locked behind them.

The worst part is always stripping down. Craig constantly feels like there is something he should say before doing it, but for some reason he is just far too awkward to do so. Tweek is a person of few words anyway – he always shucks his jeans with a silent desperation and he pulls his shirt over his head without even bothering to undo the buttons. When he is done, he helps Craig undo his fly and the way he holds him by the belt loops is surprisingly forcible. But then, when Tweek gets his shirt of he is just a surprisingly forcible guy. He has good arms and a nice chest, and Craig likes the way he smells, the way his skin is smooth and warm and covered in tiny invisible hairs. He likes the way that when Tweek pushes him down on the mattress and crawls over him, he looks bigger than Craig, and stronger, and his hair is an unbrushed mess but it makes him look like something from a dream. Unreal and handsome as all hell.

“Jesus Christ.” He breathes, and the warmth makes Craig’s arms prickle deliciously. A hand slides down the smooth lines of his waist and comes to rest at the high point on the crest of his hip. The soft lacy thing there, between Tweek’s palm and his skin, feels like it s burning on his flesh. Craig reaches up and curls his fingers in Tweek’s hair. A part of him turns syrupy and warm when Tweek kisses him.

It’s kind of embarrassing, the things Craig is willing to do to keep this guy in his life.

This shy guy, who can’t be tasked with something as simple as making a telephone call without breaking down. This _beautiful_ guy, who drinks coffee and takes Ritalin, whose hands shake and who tosses and turns at night because he sees monsters every time he closes his eyes. Craig adores him, adores the way he talks and the way he moves as though he isn’t quite sure how to navigate the world around him in his body, and he lets him murmur dirty fantasies in his ear when they are alone together because otherwise, Tweek would never, ever, _ever_ be able to ask for them out loud. The difference that this allowance makes is amazing, and it’s kind of worth the special loads of laundry on Saturdays when his parents are out of the house. He likes that doing this makes him feel good – it makes him feel like he has achieved something for the sake of someone else, and he’s so used to wearing panties now that he hardly even treats it like it’s weird any more. Sometimes, in gym class, he feels the elastic rising above the waistband of his shorts and he has to hide them away before someone notices. Other times, he feels it happening and he forgets.

This is the kind of thing that weird guys like Tweek _would_ be in to. The kind of thing that quiet, stoic guys with cool personalities like Craig’s would never even for a minute entertain. And that’s probably why they get on so well like this. Why it’s so hot to feel Tweek curling his fingers in the textiles and the stitches, and to listen to him moan quietly against Craig’s lips as they fumble.

“Don’t rip them.” He insists, because Tweek is tugging on the fabric pretty fucking hard and it’s driving him absolutely _crazy_. “Fuckin… expensive…”

“So I’ll buy you new ones” Tweek replies without thinking, letting himself slide off the bed and onto the hardwood floor on his knees. Craig arranges his legs and tries to sit up, his hat sliding off and landing on the sheets next to him. “Open more.”

It surprised him the first time, and it will probably continue to surprise him in future, how Tweek becomes nothing but simple words when he’s horny. Nothing but short sentences. Actions. The concentration he lacks in every other aspect of his life materialises in the heat of the moment, so that there are no little jumps or nervous whines. There are no ‘Oh man’s or ‘Jesus Christ’s or anything like that. Just ‘lie down,’ ‘spread your legs,’ and ‘use your tongue’.

Craig likes that about him too.

He groans when he feels warm arms curl around his thighs.

“Oh _Fuck yes_ …”

The heat of Tweek’s mouth feels different through cotton. It feels different through silk too. And netting. And that light transparent stuff Craig likes the look of but doesn’t usually wear. He finds that really he likes it best through lace though - Even more than he likes it on his bare skin. He likes the roughness, and the way the wetness takes a while to soak through, and generally speaking he likes that Tweek’s hair tickles the insides of his legs and his lower belly as he goes down on him. He lifts his hips up off the mattress and tries to rock them against that warmness. The heavy breathing and the humidity of that mouth is turning the front of his underwear semi-opaque.

The bed creaks, and Craig bites his lip so hard it throbs in sync with the rest of his body. It throbs along with his cock as well, and he reaches down to cradle Tweek’s face in his hands.

“Take it out?”

He pushes hair off his partner’s forehead, and watches his eyes flicker up to lock with his. They are green. A light minty colour. Craig feels a tight, pleasurable pulse in his belly – how does he have such perfect eyes? Such perfect lips and hair and hands. And how does he so easily lay them on his body like it’s nothing? Tweek bites his lip and obliges him, sliding a hand under the elastic of Craig’s panties and letting his cock free.

“Don’t make me cum yet.” He murmurs, and the corners of Tweek’s mouth twitch up shyly.

“I dunno… That’s a lot of pressure.”

His fingers curl on Craig’s upper thighs and his nail beds are ragged, but they feel good. When he strokes the edge of the underwear lying against Craig’s skin, Craig feels his whole body tingle and he lets himself fall backwards against the mattress again. Pressure… fucking _pressure_ nothing. If Tweek wanted him to cum, he would cum. Once, twice, or twenty times it doesn’t matter - His back arches and his fingers twist in the duvet when lips first brush the unclothed head of his dick.

This is so much better than classes.

The empty house is a blessing, because it means he doesn’t have to hold in his relief at finally having a mouth there, and despite a nervous countenance Tweek is not the kind of person to stop sucking him off to say ‘keep your voice down’. Craig had never asked, but he always kind of thought it was because he stops thinking when he’s turned on. He stops worrying about the things that bother him every day, and it’s beautiful. _Craig_ does that to him. Craig is the one who makes him want to kneel and suck dick and maybe he shouldn’t get a kick from that but he can’t help it.

It’s so good. It’s so amazing. And he feels his breath catching when Tweek’s tongue strokes the underside of his length. A dangerous feeling of heat is coiling in his guts, and his thighs start to quiver like he is cold, even though he knows there is sweat starting to bead on his nape and his brow. He wants to thrust, but the hands holding his pelvis stop him from doing so and the panties stretched over his upper legs make him feel kind of like he has been bound. Like he is powerless, and the head buried between his thighs is his only master.

Craig draws a deep breath in and struggles to find release from this wonderful sense of being teased. Of having small dabs of precum lapped from his tip, and the fine elastic of his underwear pulled and rubbed over his skin until he feels his flesh prickle with sensitivity. He moans, and Tweek swallows down more, and he feels muscles in his lower belly contract against his will. A warm hand finds its way into his crotch, and this time it doesn’t stop at the root of his dick or his balls. It caries on along the curve if his ass, and the feeling of being touched like this, explored by fingers creeping into the hidden parts of his body, makes him shudder in pleasure and his legs open even wider.

Even though he is still partially clothed, he feels bare and unhidden, all aspects of himself on display, and the admiration he receives in exchange makes him absolutely euphoric. Tweek comes off his cock and rubs his lips against the inside of Craig’s legs, but his hand is still in there pressing and rubbing and making him writhe on the mattress.

“Alright?” he breathes, and Craig nods, unable to meet his eyes or even acknowledge that he is feeling that gaze on him. He senses it taking in his flushed cheeks and his pulsing cock, and his lips which feel so sensitive and dark it’s like the two parts of his body are connected. When Tweek pulls himself up, and his hand moves from where it was in his panties to his chest, Craig feels his whole frame ache with longing for more.

Kissing him is like feeling him on his dick again. His lips are wet and just as full as Craig’s so it’s hardly any wonder the connection makes him groan quietly too, and behind the flimsy decency of his underwear he is hard like he wants to fuck Craig stupid and maybe he _does_. Maybe he does want that because without even enough time to put up a fight Craig finds his arms pinned above his head and his legs wrapped around Tweek’s waist. He has sharp hipbones, and they dig into Craig’s calves where he grips him.

“I love this colour.” He says against the shell of Craig’s ear, and the hand not pinning Craig’s up moves between their bodies again to the lingerie, and the seams which are threatening to give because they are a little too far down on the upper portion of Craig’s legs. Craig feels his body pulled upwards against him, like he is magnetic or maybe Craig is just frantic, and his blood tingles when he hears the quiet sound of threads popping one by one.

“You can’t rip those.” he tells him half-heartedly, and just to prove he can Tweek whines and gives them a huge tug. Of course, they tear, and Craig feels a blow like he has just found a new way to orgasm. It takes him by surprise just as much as it does to feel a dick pressing without hesitation against his ass.

“Oh my god, I don’t have lube.” Tweek tells him breathlessly. Craig doesn’t care, even though there is a part of him which recoils at the notion of having sex without the proper equipment. Instead he just says something about fucking him raw, which probably sounded better in the porno he heard it in than it does out loud, and Tweek presses the fabric of his torn up panties against his throat and his neck and his collar as though he is trying to rub the colour over Craig’s skin.

“I can’t do that!” he says desperately, and Craig realises that he is very concerned about this. They are going to have to find some kind of a compromise.

Craig has a condom he has had since eighth grade in his backpack. It’s the pre-lubed kind, so he doesn’t _have_ to look any further for extra (although a little extra would not have gone awry). Tweek rolls it on with ease and practice and his hands don’t even shake, so that’s a huge improvement from the first time they fucked and he had been so nervous they wasted half a box, trying to figure out the intricacies of such a simple device. Craig’s heart is beating in his throat. He grips the pillow behind his head as he lies back and Tweek pulls his legs open. He’s clutching the fabric and the stuffing like he is trying to reduce it to dust, because the feeling of having something in his hands reminds him that this is real and not just some heavy sex dream where he might wake up sweating and gagging for something in his ass.

“You okay?”

“Yes. Fine. Just do it.”

And then he _is_ doing it, and Craig can feel himself breaking open - painfully at first, but then sweetly, and the sensation of being filled makes him feel like he doesn’t have room to breathe or room to think. The only thing he knows is the familiar smell of another body, and the crumpled softness under the small of his back where his shredded underwear was thrown, and gradually the soft kisses along his throat and jaw melt the tension he is holding in all his muscles and his bones.

“ _Oh_! Shit!”

“Hold my shoulders?”

Hot breath against his ear sends ripples of sensation down his limbs, and the silky texture of slightly damp skin presses against the tender undersides of his arms when he curls them around Tweek’s neck. The hair brushing his cheek is so fluffy, and it smells like organic shampoo.

Fucking him is like something out of a fantasy - It starts slow and sensual and almost every thrust is aimed with great practice at his prostate. Craig feels his toes curl and flex in time with his partners hips, because honestly he never wants this hot, glowing feeling to end, but soon the deep, slow burning kisses become frantic, wet licks against his tongue and the hands braced on his hips become rough and hard and demanding and he hears himself moan in urgent desperation. He adores the feeling of being fucked recklessly too. Cold air is leaking between them and making his nipples feel hard and surprisingly sensitive. He wants Tweek to kiss them like he is kissing the lobe of his ear, and lick them like he is licking the contour of his throat. Instead he drags one of his hands up and pinches at one. His other hand reaches between them and starts rubbing his cock in slow, deliberate strokes. When his eyes flutter open he expects to see the same snowy lights he sees with them closed but instead he sees his partner bowed over him and trying to hold himself together. Trying to pinch his brows and close his eyes and make Craig come before he finishes as well.

Tweek has always been so sweet like that. The little allowances Craig makes are only because he can’t say the words he hears Tweek breathe when he’s close to orgasm.

Scalloped lace and thin silk is just another way to say ‘I love you’.

Craig arches his back and inhales sharply when he feels Tweek’s length strike against that delicious, swollen spot inside him again. He knows it’s deliberate, and the thought makes his belly swoop, so he bears down on that cock as hard as he can when Tweek pushes forwards again. This time, the contact is drawn out and deep and he’s breaking into a cold sweat and shaking like he is scared to come undone. He stops jerking himself off to clutch the sheets, he can feel himself teetering on the brink of release so he can’t help wanting to scream when Tweek slides home again and his whole body spasms involuntarily, the muscles in his core releasing in waves and making him twist against the bed. He is sure he must sound like an idiot - When he’s alone it’s easy to keep his relief in, but when he’s actually having sex he can’t help himself; his voice comes out in an embarrassingly high sound that is _unmistakably_ orgasmic, and he feels vulnerable for a split second before he hears Tweek groaning too. The fast, gasping shivers that run through his partner feel so different to the languid, total body release Craig experiences. Sometimes, in the aftermath, he wonders blearily what it feels like for him but he never asks. Usually, they are too busy lying there in silence trying to recover. Tweek fascinates himself with playing with Craig’s dirty underwear. It’s impossible to know what’s on his mind.

Today, they roll apart and Craig sighs. The slow return to reality always makes him feel tired and just as restless as he was before they even left class, although it feels a little more bearable when Tweek curls their fingers together and lets him know that it’s okay, if he wants to cuddle. Craig wants to – he always wants to cuddle after they do this and this is another little thing he wants because he doesn’t know how to admit he loves this guy. He loves his smell, and his sweetness, and the weird little kinks and quirks that turn him on, but most of all Craig loves that Tweek loves _him_. And he can feel it in the warmth of their skin and in the way that Tweek isn’t grossed out or uncomfortable when they curl up together even though Craig still has cum on his belly. The used condom is cast into the wastebasket beside the bed. The used panties are for once, forgotten. It’s not like Tweek to just ignore them once he has ejaculated but maybe today is different because Craig is so much clingier than usual. Tweek lets his fingers comb through rumpled black hair instead.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, and Craig shrugs like its nothing. He wants to say ‘I should be the one thanking you’ but instead he says

“No problem. But next time, you can supply the underwear you want to ruin.”

Which is close enough.


	2. You will not be reimbursed for reading this fanfiction, for which i apologise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One-sided, angst, pining, 2nd person, Internet sex, dirty fantasies, Sex work, On-Cam Masturbation, vibrator masturbation, standard pasteurized full cream masturbation, mentions of previous masturbation.   
> (oh boy)  
> In which craig is a cam boy and tweek has issues with admitting hes obsessed with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUESS WHAT? 
> 
> I used to write a lot of homestuck fanfiction so I have an unfortunate habit of writing stuff in 2nd person.
> 
> Please excuse any mistakes in this, the first edition of this happy little fiction. tbh, its 1am and i will edit it more thoroughly tomorrow. maybe.

“Craig?”

You stand outside his bedroom door with your head resting against the door frame. You have a splitting headache, and the thin edge of the basket of dirty laundry you are holding cuts into your fingers. You wait for him to answer, but he always takes forever, and you feel your eyes drop shut before you even hear his feet hit the carpet. His footsteps are punctuated by the sound of him kicking clothes and shoes and towels out of the way so he can get to the door.

“What?” he pulls open the door and glares at you. His hair is unbrushed and he is only wearing a pair of boxer briefs. “I was sleeping.”

You check your watch, note that it’s 1pm on a Saturday, and decide against saying anything about it.

“I’m doing laundry, if you want some done? Then I have to go get more coffee filters from the supermarket.”

Craig studies you with narrowed eyes for a moment, before sucking in a deep breath and disappearing back into his dim bedroom.

“Can you buy me some tollhouse cookies from the bakery?” he asks, reappearing with a wad of crumpled dollar bills in his hand. “And a bottle of scrumpy. You know the one I like.”

You do – he likes the pear one that makes you think of rotten fruit and that tarry dead-leaf substance that sometimes clogs the gutters after it rains. Wordlessly, you nod and take the money.

You think he is going to dismiss you now, send you back to your anxious pottering and tidying so he can climb back in to bed, but he doesn’t. As he watches you struggle to balance the washing basket and cram the wadded money into your butt pocket, you feel yourself flushing, and you are about to ask him what he’s staring at when he catches you off guard.

“… You okay?”

You press your lips together and nod, staring at the poster of Jim Morrison he has on his bedroom door so you don’t have to meet his gaze. This isn’t of very much use however – Craig and the late mister Morrison have similarly deep set eyes.

“Just worrying about work.” You say. Craig knows you are lying, because you are a dental assistant and you have told him many times that after three years on the job you have learned this is one of the few professions where anything could ever possibly go wrong. All you have to do is pass instruments and stare at teeth, and in a way once you learn all the equipment and what it’s used for, it’s an awful lot like being a barista. Except you were fired from your job as a barista during college because one day you had a panic attack and spilled hot coffee on your managers chest

“Really?”

“Really really. No laundry?” You try and change the subject. Craig shakes his head and sighs, leaning against the door frame and looking at you through sleepy, bedroom eyes.

“Nope. But actually, now I’m thinking about it, can you get me some body lotion from the supermarket too? Something fruity and cool smelling. I dunno.”

You jerk your head in acquiescence, and he continues to study you thoughtfully. There is a brief, thick moment where he parts his lips and you think he is going to say something else, but he doesn’t.

You huff and turn on your heel, heading down the hall toward the laundry room. The floorboards creak tiredly underfoot, and you are balancing the laundry basket on your hip, reaching carefully for the dented and discoloured doorknob when he raises his voice and calls to you carefully in that flat, nasal voice he has.

“I’m working tonight, by the way. So you can’t come bother me after six o’clock.”

When you crane your neck back to glare at him over your shoulder, he has disappeared back into his room. Your mouth feels dry and lined with cotton wool, and when you try to rattle the laundry door open you end up dropping the basket, all your dirty clothes and towels and underwear from the last week spilling onto the floor.

God you hate him. You hate him you hate him you _hate_ him so fucking much.

You wish someone had told you that apartment sharing with your childhood friend would be the death of you.

…

You check your watch, and note that it is almost five fifty five. Your room is terrifyingly clean, you spent all of the afternoon arranging it just so according to the book on fengshui you checked out of the library in the hopes that doing so would make your head clearer and your life calmer. So far, it hasn’t worked.

You are biting the quick of your nails in anxiety when you sit down on your bed and pull your laptop toward you, and you can’t hear a thing in the apartment even though you know he is here as well, cloistered in his bedroom which probably hasn’t seen sunlight for weeks and most definitely smells like his skin and his sheets and the solid deodorant bar he uses because you refuse to let him have aerosol cans in the house (they might explode quite spontaneously and burn the whole building down). As you boot up your computer you fold your legs under you and pull off your socks. You grope for your headphones in your bedside table and find them neatly wrapped around a business card for the downtown hypnotherapy office. When you have plugged them in (and only when you have plugged them in) you log in and open up your browser of choice, which of course is google chrome in incognito mode. You know the address and the login by heart, and you try and force your hands steady as you type the credentials in. This is difficult, because you want to vomit and your stomach feels like it is knotting and unknotting again with relish, but you manage. Just like you have managed many times before.

You know that one day, you are going to get busted. You know that one day, he is going to catch on. Maybe he already has, because honestly you _never_ disturb Craig after four pm these days – he would have no reason to tell you that he was working tonight unless he wanted to bring your attention to it. You can’t think about that too much though. You can’t think about him knowing because _that_ makes you think about the big vast internet and just how easy it is to relay information back via satellites and fibre optics and to remotely control webcams and trace IP addresses and this is why you keep a post t note over the webcam on the top of your laptop computer. Why you use a portable wireless hotspot instead of the broadband connection he uses when he is on shift, and you don’t know how accurately user location can be traced but thank _god_ you live in a building with about four hundred other people all piled on top and crammed next to each other. If worse comes to worse, you can always just blame it on the creepy old man next door.

You press your thumb against the sticky note on your webcam to ensure it is well attached, and wait for the login to be approved.

Soon you are in the chatroom, there are already seven other users waiting, and the webcam window is black and empty so you check your watch and see that it is five fifty eight pm. The other people in the chat are exchanging greetings, and it makes you feel a pang of sickening jealousy when you realise that you recognise some of their usernames. Regular customers are like competition to you. The closest you can get to real competition, when the only person you have ever loved is a celibate heterosexual boy milking closeted or lonely men for $4.99 a minute for the first five minutes (and $10 per five minute block after) on a twenty hour a week basis.

How miserable.

You fiddle with your headphones volume a bit, ignoring to the best of your ability the vile way these strangers you have never met are discussing the potential uses and abuses of your housemates body, and gnaw at your lip in waiting for the show to begin.

He only started doing shows like this recently. His previous stint on the straight boy roulette site had brought enough traffic and income that he started taking scheduled appointments and beyond that, private shows for very rich and very filthy strangers. You absolutely _refuse_ to go that far though. You aren’t going to compromise your dignity that much. You think if Craig knows already that you pay to log in to his normal room, he must be kind of alright with it so long as you don’t get up and rub it in his face. But if he found out you were donating half your paycheck to make him moan your name on camera, he would probably insist on moving out immediately and never speaking to you again.  Then who would walk around in his underwear on Sunday mornings and give you unexpected boners when you are trying to make a coffee? Then who would leave his dirty cereal bowls stacked on the coffee table, or watch sixteen straight hours of naruto without moving from his spot on the sofa once, and subsist entirely on tollhouse cookies he makes you buy from the bakery down the road because he is too lazy and too bored with his life to leave the apartment building.

What does he even _do_ with the money he makes from this gig? What the fuck does he spend it on? Scrumpy cider and guinea pig pellets, maybe? Or maybe stupid knitted sweaters and fancy phones. The latest macbook. Videogames and soda and widescreen televisions and that one time for Christmas he had gotten you a bottle of expensive cologne like it wasn’t even a big fucking deal. _God_ you hate him so much!

But not enough for you to turn your eyes off the screen when the webcam window pops up, and you feel a lump rising in your throat as the little loading circle goes around and around as it connects.

There are a lot more users in the room now. Many of them, like yourself, are not typing anything.

Craig’s room looks different, transmitted through the internet and relayed to your computer in 1080 definition. It looks tidier for one, but maybe that’s because he tidied it earlier, and his drawn curtains and bedside lamp don’t look dingy and gross at all. In fact, it makes the room look kind of radiant, and it shines on Craig’s skin like he is a vision made of gold. His hair is black as coals and his eyes look endless and burning amongst thick lashes and the smooth pebbled freckles on his nose and his cheeks and on the very edges of his lips. His freckles don’t stand out so much usually, and you think that really, this just makes him feel more like a dream.

 _“Hey_.”

His voice sounds different, augmented by the connection, but it is definitely him because it gives you the same tingly, goose pimple feeling that makes your inner thighs tender in anticipation.

_“Are you having a good evening?”_

You are never able to work out if he is actually asking, or if he just has some kind of a script to read from. He always says the same thing, and always there is no response, like far away in god knows how many corners of the world every other person watching is wondering the same thing as you right now. Thinking the same thing as you with the same sense of shame and self hatred and making your vision blurry, your cheeks warm.

He’s such a fucking harpie. The way he waves at the camera like he doesn’t even care that he supposed to be _entertaining_ makes you furious, and makes you want to grab him and give him a shake, and you have never been much of a testosterone freak but _fuck_ he makes you want to beat things up and watch sports and shout loud drunken things at strangers because you’re a dirty fucking pig of a man and you are _angry_. He makes you angry, and its worse than the kind of angry you might have felt at being fucked over by a particularly unpleasant stranger on the street because it’s the kind of angry that you know you could act on. Right now. You could go in there and tell him to _stop fucking with you_ and maybe shout some cruel things about how his teeth are crooked so when he smiles he looks like he is wearing badly made vampire fangs. Now that would be a show!

He gives the camera a cool little smile and pushes his hand through his hair to rumple it thoroughly.

 _“I just woke up_.” He muses quietly, and you know he is lying about that and you feel some part of yourself twinge in disappointment. This is fake, this is all so fake, but you wish you could pretend it wasn’t just for a little while. You wish you could look at his slim arms in an arctic monkeys tee and his lovely long legs in tight fitting underwear and believe that this stranger really had been sleeping all afternoon. Twisting in sheets and making soft, breathy noises instead of demolishing a packet of cookies and a half litre of cider in one sitting.

The first message pops up in the message box, and there is a brief moment where he reads it and you can see his eyes moving across the text as he goes.

 

1801-ANALVAPE69: nice shirt babe.

 

The corners of his mouth curl up and he plucks at the hem of the top teasingly.

 _“I borrowed it from my housemate.”_ He says. _“I can’t talk too loud in case I wake him up right now.”_

This triggers a whole burst of messages from viewers, who up until this moment had been under the impression he lived alone. In a little bubble defined by the parameters of their sexual fantasy. You are much too startled to hear him refer to you so lightly – you have never seen that shirt in your entire life.

Is this some kind of a mind game he is playing? Is he trying to make you say something incriminating? You can’t hide behind a username forever, particularly if you bash in something like ‘ _craig youre a fucking liar_ ’ without properly thinking it through.

Most of his messages are the kind that try to convince him to get rowdy. To play with himself until his faceless house mate appears and tells him to shut the fuck up. Better yet, until he comes and fucks him silent. An idea that makes your whole body cold, and then hot again in quick succession.

He scrolls down the chat and elects the more demure of these inquiries to answer.

_“Oh, he’s okay. We don’t talk much and I don’t think he knows what I do. You know?”_

JESUS. Jesus fucking Christ, you ought to go in there right now and scream at him for these blatant lies he is feeding people.

The quick flood of questions now is starting to make your skin crawl. People _really_ get into this stuff. They really do live for the fantasy, and you can tell because of the details they are begging for.

_Does he ever touch you?_

_Have you guys ever made out?_

_What does he look like?_

_Do you wish you could ride his thick, juicy cock?_

But god, why would anyone _fantasize_ about this? Who would want to fantasize, when Craig was right there as he was, in front of them, no more and no less? A person with beautiful lips and speckled shoulders, and dimples on the small of his back above the waistband of his pants. Why were they here for the daydream, when all it was was just this gorgeous looking guy making himself cum on camera a hundred different ways? Each time his breath caught, each time the muscles in hiss legs tensed, you think you are going to bust with how badly you want to reach through the screen and touch him. But you don’t, and instead you sit here numbly watching him string people along and lie to them and you are no better than they are because you still buy it enough to wish. To be envious of the people who can keep him contained in the realm of daydreams and impossibility. For them, he isn’t just a few metres down the hall.

You bite your lip and wait for him to pick one and respond.

“ _We’re just friends.”_ he insists, twisting at the fabric of the shirt in a coyish act so sickening, it makes you dizzy. Craig has _never_ done this kind of thing around you. Not in all the years you’ve known each other. On screen he is the perfect twink, but in real life he is tall and cold and he keeps a stack of playboys out of the view of his camera and concealed thinly under his bed. _“He’s nice though. He does my laundry and cooks me food and lets me wear his clothes to bed.”_

The audience love this. You squirm in your spot on the bed and pull the headphones off, to make sure the volume is low enough that absolutely no sound whatsoever can be heard outside the canals of your own ears.

Some asshole asks : DO YOU SHARE A BED?

Craig gives the camera a desperately fake little smile, but to anyone he didn’t know it could have been genuine.

 _“Sometimes_. _On cold nights we sit together and he holds on to me until I fall asleep.”_

He crosses his legs underneath him, and his webcam (probably stacked atop a pile of filthy magazines on his bed) jiggles as he moves. This is one of his tricks – if the camera moves when he does, it creates a sense of _thereness_ that a stationary camera doesn’t. It really brings the viewer in, makes them believe it’s their weight on the mattress and their gaze directed at his body propped up by navy pillows. Theirs alone.

He lets the rush of questions flood the chat. You glare at him furiously, trying not to tremble and trying not to let his face degrade into a mess of meaningless pixels of colour. His is _Craig_. This is a real person, and it’s horrible how empty he can make you feel to watch him play for others like this. Why can’t he just be _yours_? His serene smile doesn’t budge an inch as he sits back and starts walking his fingers playfully up the inside of one of his thighs.

 _“He has warm hands_ ,” he muses, and even in high definition it is impossible to make out the thoughts behind his eyes. If he thought he was _funny_ doing this, or if he was being cruel and unkind and

You suddenly experience a mental image, visceral and intensely sensual, of him and you wrapped up in a duvet on the sofa watching TV. His feet are in your lap and you can feel his anklebones. The long dark hairs on his lower legs tickle your hands as you caress his shins. He’s talking about _you_ right now, isn’t he? An alternate, clearly fantastical you for sure, but whoever this housemate of his might be he had to be at least partway associated with your face. Your voice. Your actions.

The feeling brings with it a whole sense of hyper-reality that makes you realise how much money you have spent on this stupid horny kick already. How much you are going to spend before you watch him shiver and spurt come over his knuckles. Maybe you should just pay him cash one day and beg him to masturbate just for you instead. No camera, no screen, no anonyminity. Just the _truth_ and the boner stretching the front of your jeans enough that you have to fumble open a button shamefully. You push down the zipper and without taking your eyes off the screen you pull your dick out to release it from entrapment.

_Where does he put them on you?_

_Do you let him jerk you off?_

_Have you ever thought about licking his fingers while he takes you from behind?_

Craig laughs softly, an uncharacteristic, girlish laugh, and pushes up the hem of his shirt enough to show off his hipbones and navel. Underneath the fabric, you can see him rubbing his left nipple. Circling it slowly with his thumb and teasing it to a stiff button under a cotton veil. You envision stroking your tongue across it, feeling the hardness and pinning him down as he squirms and starts to loose control of his breathing.

 _“He never touches me_ ,” Craig says, and a fierce hot guilt floods your body because that’s true at least, you _do_ never touch him. You try to avoid him most of the time because you are incredibly attracted to him, and it’s difficult for you to look someone in the eye after you’ve seen them fuck themselves to orgasm with a plastic cock. _“So usually I wait until he’s gone so I can touch myself instead.”_

Holy fuck.

So many spontaneous questions rise to the surface of your mind. What was his first time jerking off like? How did he usually prefer to do it when there were no cameras around? Did he moan when he has his cock sucked in the same way he moans as he creeps his fingers down the valley of his navel and over his treasure trail, or does he moan in a different way? A way that makes your toes curl and your balls tighten in excitement. You squeeze your fingers tighter around your length and ignore the almost uncontrollable desire to start rubbing it out. To start touching the screen like you are touching the boarders of his personage and fucking your hand like it’s his lips or his ass or any part of him that will have you really. You don t mind.

You like how he isn’t teasing anyone tonight – he just pushes down the elastic of his waistband and reveals the semi-erect vision that is his dick, and the dark, curling nest of hair at his base.

You love how he has his body hair. You love how he has those little valleys over his hipbones pulling your eyes to his crotch. Mostly you want to bury your face there and swallow him into your mouth. You think he probably smells sweetest between his legs, and tastes only a fraction less delicious than his lips.

You don’t even read what the audience says to this because you are too busy staring at his every detail. Every line and contour and crease, and the way that he thickens up as he starts to stroke himself slowly, up and down. The camera jiggles and you suck in a breath. His eyes flutter and you try to strain your ears listening beyond the noise isolation in your headphones.

Despite his claims that he wants to avoid it, you can sometimes hear him through the walls.

“ _Fuck_.”

You can’t help it any more, you have to touch yourself, and you try to make it slow to match the teasing way he runs his fingers along his length. Frustrated with his soft voice and lazy attempts to sound seductive, you jerk one of your earphones out again and try to hear harder than you had been before. It’s the way he swears like that, breathless and effortlessly sexy, that gets under your skin, and you think you want to hear him murmur dirty things sweetly against your lips and your throat and your ears more than you have ever wanted anything. You try and concentrate on watching his face and body, the way his hands move and his lips look, and before you can help it you are curling your fingers in your duvet in an effort to stop yourself from finishing. It kills you every time, how quick it is for him to work you up like this, and how even the smallest shiver he gives can bring you to the brink. The cusp. The absolute edge of an orgasm.

Drawing cool air into your lungs, you look away, to the posters on your walls and the neatly folded towels on your shelf to distract yourself. You ignore the sound of new messages coming in, letting yourself be lost just briefly in the daydream that one day, he might let you kiss him. That one day, he will touch your hand by accident and let it linger, running his fingers over your wrists and across your palms.

When you look back, he is moving, reaching off camera for something you suspect is going to be that dildo he has. The one he fucks himself with sometimes, and it amazes you when he comes without touching his erection. When the upper half of his body returns in screen, however, he is not holding the meticulously detailed plastic cock but another thing – an item long and slim and silver, it vaguely resembles a pen, and when he twists the end it starts making a sound so soft its like a little whisper. You can’t see the movement, but you bet our right testicle its vibrating.

 _“New toy.”_ He reports sweetly, opening his legs and sliding the device over the crevasse between his hip and his inner thigh. The edge of it brushes the base of his dick, and the crowd goes absolutely _wild_ with messages. You bite the inside of your cheek and rub at the precome issuing from the tip of your cock impatiently. You can feel release creeping on you, perched on your shoulders and waiting for the final erotic detail to send you over. When he starts stroking the pen along the underside of his length and moaning, you swear and yank your hand hurriedly away.

This isn’t fair. This isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair.

You just want to _come_. You just want to finish, but he won’t let you. The voice at the back of your head, the one which always says the most awful things, whispers something about him knowing. About how he’s doing this on purpose, to punish you. He’s making fun of you. He hates you. He loves sitting back at watching you squirm.

You shut the voice up immediately, but the ghosts of your worries remain. What if he _is_ doing this intentionally? What if this exquisite tease isn’t for the audience, or the money, but a very specialised and personal cruelty designed just for you? If that’s the case, then surely he knows that when you finish you will only be able to lie there unsleeping, consumed with guilt and _dirty_ \- Feeling filthy and bad and evil because its not right, to harbour these kinds of feelings for your friends. It isn’t right, to overlap his work and your sick play. You want him. So badly. But you know it isn’t right for you to feel this way.

Craig is straight, and unattainable. You are hopelessly besotted with his face. You have never felt this way about anyone before, and you have never been intimate with another human, and you know it’s not because you’re unlikable or ugly (plenty of people have tried to hit on you in the past) but because you are scared of what its like, to be allowed to have someone. You are scared, just like you are scared right now, knowing you could walk next door right now and catch him and there was literally nothing physical or real in the world to stop you.

You are afraid of yourself. And of your own attractions, and you don’t want to come yet because when you do, it will all be too much. Too real.

Craig makes a breathless, wanton noise and when you think about how it would feel to inspire such a sound from him, a shiver rolls sweetly down your spine. When he circles the tip of his cock with his pen, you mirror the action with your index finger, eyes fixed on his face and the way his eyes look. How he uses the muscles in his face when he whines.

“ _Oh fuck. Yessss…”_

You can’t look at the comments – they are popping up so quickly, one after the other. Stupid little things like

_Come for me baby._

_I want to make you say my name._

It’s hard not to imagine breathing these words to him yourself when you give in, and resume stroking your dick.

You come far too early, and far too hard. It sweeps through your belly and makes you shudder with pleasure, and for an awful moment you think you might have made a sound of pained relief but if you did Craig on the screen doesn’t seem to have noticed through the walls. He still looks the same, teasing himself like nothing had happened, and rightly so because for him so far, nothing _has_ happened. Everything on his side of the screen was the same.

When he comes, he comes with a little cry you hear through the panels of your wall. It stirs nothing in you, but deepens the remorse and feeling of hollowness in your bones.

You linger in the room until there are only three or four of you left, watching him in pixels and static and fiddling with the ends of his hair. When he decides enough people have gone, he smiles in a way that feels much more familiar to you, and your stomach knots up all over again. You want to puke. You want to scream. You want to pull out your hair and throw it at him, punch him and clutch him and break him until he is yours and yours alone.

He raises a middle finger to the camera before he turns it off. You sit there in silence afterwards, watching the black box on the computer screen.

After a while, your laptop dies and the screen goes black.

You don’t notice.


	3. (UN)Speakable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I Literally have 100 other things i should be doing but i wrote this instead.

The evening closes in slowly. They sit in Token’s yard on lawn chairs, eating sandwiches and talking about what they plan to do over the summer. The air is warm and peachy coloured, and smells like citronella candles. Tweek is still wearing the t-shirt he swum in – a plain white one which looks transparent when its wet, and it sits on his back and belly in a way which seems more naked than his bare skin. Craig sits between Clyde and Kenny, wondering if he has noticed the sunburn on the bridge of his nose, and Tweek must feel him staring because every now and then he pauses at his place in his conversation and shoots Craig an apologetic smile.

 _We can leave soon_ , he says, without really saying anything at all. Bebe seems enchanted by his chatter – she nods and laughs in all the right places, and Craig watches his friend discuss all manner of things that have no meaning. The weather. Local gossip. The kaleidoscope of pastel colours threaded through Bebe’s hair. He realises he is biting his nail beds, and forces himself to stop and look elsewhere. For some reason he feels kind of light headed and dizzy – maybe he has ingested too much pool water. Maybe he hasn’t eaten enough sandwiches today.

Tweek walks him home, and many times their hands brush against each other although they haven’t actually locked their fingers and palms together properly for a long time. It is dark by now, and overhead the stars have started to come out from their little corners of the sky. Tweek doesn’t say much, but Craig observes that today he seems calm. Craig’s whole chest area is aching. He feels a little bit as though the sensation is going to choke him. He can’t find anything to of importance to say, although he tries.

“Are you still okay to drive me to see my grandma this Tuesday?”

Tweek says he will. Of course he will. And Craig should have known he would say such a thing because after all, what else was a good boyfriend for?

Sometimes, Craig is unsure if he even knows what that word means anymore.

They go in the car to Boulder, and Tweek is driving. Craig issues instructions to get to the home, and Tweek dutifully follows, humming along to the radio and letting air flood through the crack above the rolled down window. It billows and whistles in the cabin, and on the warm breeze Craig can smell the perfume of his hair. He knows what songs Tweek likes the moment they come on the radio, and he wonders if maybe he should turn them up louder and roll down his window too. Hang his hand out and try to catch onto the wind. He wants to, but acknowledging this desire scares him because honestly, he doesn’t really understand why it’s there.

The nursing home, like always, is depressing. Tweek always gets twitchy in places that remind him of hospitals, and although Craig knows it’s funny when he trips over a collapsible wheelchair (clumsy) and sends it clattering down a flight of stairs, he can only really laugh at him half-heartedly because Tweek is gushing apologies to the nurse and his cheeks are so pink they make him look like he’s wearing rogue. There is a brief moment where Craig wonders if he would flush like that if Craig were to kiss him, and just for a moment he has to find a sofa, and sit down. The idea makes him feel funny, like someone has replaced all the bones in his legs with thread. Tweek asks him if he’s okay because he looks like he is about to be sick. He passes him a shiny clean bedpan off the trolley by the utility closet, and _this_ time Craig laughs so hard he starts crying. Tweek is so embarrassed he has to shush him, and rub his shoulders gently to calm him down.

When they get back home, Tweek invites him to dinner and he says yes. He walks into the Tweak household like always except for some reason he feels a bit like something has changed. He is acutely aware of the smell of coffee in the carpets and on the curtains, and when Tweek leans past him to grab the salt the perfume of his aftershave makes Craig’s stomach turn over.

Suddenly, he isn’t so hungry any more.

He sits next to Clyde on a Friday afternoon for classics – a class Craig never could bring himself to like. Clyde is watching YouTube videos on his phone and Craig is watching over his shoulder, even though his mind is a mile away. The Aeneid sits unread in front of them, and their substitute seems disinterested in their activities. Halfway through watching a compilation of scorpions, Clyde pauses the video and gives Craig a look, like he has wanted to ask him something for a while but is only now finding the courage to do it.

“Craig,” He tries to affect an air of casual curiosity, and does not succeed. “Can I ask you a question?”

Craig is startled. He sits back and clears the vague thoughts of green eyes and chapped lips from his mind.

“You just did?”

“Oh, no, not that. Its something else, you know? It’s nothing major. It’s just… It’s about Tweek.”

Craig’s heart sinks, but he tries to look indifferent.

“What about him?”

“Ah.” He coughs uncomfortably, and Craig’s eyes narrow in suspicion. “We, that’s me and the others… were just wondering. Are you guys, that’s you and him, okay?”

Craig looks at him for a moment, uncomprehending.

“What?”

Clyde sighs and twists his fingers together uncomfortably.

“Are you okay? Like your relationship. I dunno. You never talk about it, and we were just wondering because you’ve seemed really bummed about something lately.”

“Oh.” Craig feels himself flushing, and even though he knows Clyde means well he can’t hep but be a little bit offended. Why would he assume that his low mood would have anything to do with Tweek? Come to think of it, where does he get off assuming he was even bummed about anything at all?

“Well, it’s kind of not your business, but seeing as you asked I guess I should say yes. “We” are fine. Why would you even fucking ask that dude? Jesus Christ...”

He scowls, and gouges a chunk of desk out with the sharp end of his pencil.

“Well, I don’t know!” Clyde is defensive – hardly unusual. “I’m your friend! I want to make sure you’re okay! Me and Token and Jim - we all see how you look at him. How are we supposed to interpret that?”

“I suggest you not try and interpret anything at all.”

Craig is so irritated by this exchange he can’t even speak to Clyde the rest of the class, but he can’t stop thinking about his stupid assumptions for the rest of the afternoon. They follow him home, _bothering_ him, and for the first time ever he ignores his phone when he receives a text from Tweek.

 _Working until ten tonight_ , the message says _can we re-schedule until tomorrow?_

It is actually a relief to know he won’t be seeing Tweek today. He goes home feeling a little lighter, and sits in his empty room on his single bed instead and thinks about what Clyde could possibly mean by ‘the way you look at him’, and how he has never noticed how small this room was before. When he was eleven, it was huge, but now he is huge too and the room feels cramped and tiny. He falls back on the bed and is thankful for this silent moment in this tiny closet of a bedroom, where he can’t smell coffee of aftershave and where Tweek’s arms aren’t coiled over him. He is thankful for a night where he can toss and turn, and he won’t wake up in the morning to a glowing face, glossy with a thin veil of oil and sweat, next to his, and Tweek’s eyes won’t flutter open and fix on him like he is the only thing that matters in the world.

Remembering these moments is exhausting – he rolls onto his belly and wiggles under the bedclothes, still wearing his rigid jeans. He is trembling a little. Sweating. His insides are coiled up and pulsating hotly, and inside the prison of his underpants his dick aches. He presses his face into his pillow and tries to suffocate on the smell of dusty feathers and cotton.  

Eventually, he succumbs to a restless sleep and he dreams of Tweek. His boyfriend. Except they aren’t boyfriends. Not really. Craig never liked him in that way, not even in those moments when they were close enough for Craig to feel the pulse in his bony wrist, but why is it that the word ‘friends’ doesn’t sound right in his head anymore? Why does knowing that they are only _fake_ boyfriends not feel like enough?

He feels like he is loosing his grip on something he has been aware he held before, and when he wakes he is sore, in his heart and in the cradle of his loins.

Tweek plays the xbox, Craig’s head resting on his belly and his feet propped on the armrest on the far end of the sofa. Tweek is not very good at this game, but Craig is too busy paying attention to the small noises his stomach is making to notice. When he dies, Tweek sighs and lets the controller slip from his grip to the floor. He looks down, and his jaw disappears and Craig can see up his nose, but Craig is of the opinion that he still looks beautiful.

“I suck at this, man.”

Craig’s mouth twitches up at the corners. The sound of his voice resonates in his chest and into unknown caverns of his guts.

“I forgive you.” He says, and for a brief moment Craig is aware that he is happy. Really happy. He feels so light he wonders if he is about to float away. It is a dramatic change from how he has felt the last few days.

Tweek’s finger brushes his cheek, and he sweeps a fallen eyelash away.

“Make a wish.” He says, and Craig pushes his hand down dismissively but secretly, he does. He wishes for a solution, a way to contain these feelings that leave him coiled under his blankets paralysed with longing. It is agony to want him, when he is literally _right there_ , and to know that only a single wrong move could send him spiralling far away. Craig knows that if he looses him, he will never have anything like this with anyone again.

They sit at Craig’s desk on a Wednesday, and the smell of casserole is wafting upstairs. Tweek struggles with reading comprehension, and Craig walks him patiently through The Crucible, making sure he understands the themes well enough to pass the quizzes that dog them throughout their high school careers. Every now and then, Craig feels him looking at him, the hairs on his arms prickling as Tweek’s eyes swoop over his profile. But when he looks his company is immersed in notes, his dollar store reading glasses sliding down his nose. Tweek rubs the back of his neck anxiously, and bites his lip when he comes to a question he can’t answer. Craig can taste honey and confectioners sugar, and his heart beats staccato against his ribs. When their arms brush, he gets goose pimples. When Tweek takes his wrist, to glimpse the time on his watch, Craig feels his breath leave him like a ghost from his body, and dissolve unsalvageable on the air.

“Dinner soon?” he asks, and his voice is so gentle it melts Craig’s insides. “I’m so hungry.”

Craig is hungry too, with that insatiable and unspeakable hunger for his touch. He gnaws his lip and stands up suddenly on toothpick legs.

“Let’s find out,” he says, and he can’t look Tweek in the eyes again tonight.

Craig is standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes. His family is in the lounge room watching TV. He has made Tweek a coffee, and the mug is already empty on the stack of dirties to be washed. Tweek hovers with a tea towel ready to dry, but Craig keeps nearly dropping plates and struggling to get crusty food off for prongs. Even Tweek must be able to see how shaky he is, because after saving yet another plate from disaster Tweek places the plate in the drying rack and reaches out to touch Craig’s arm.

“Hey man, are you _sure_ you’re okay?”

Craig is short on breath. His chest is tight and the edges of his vision seem dark. He can’t ignore this feeling any more, its eating him from the inside out. The pressure is killing him, and he doesn’t know if he will ever be okay again.

“Fine.” He says, even though he is trembling with the effort of containing himself. Tweek makes a noise, as though he is unsure, and the backs of his fingers brush over the underside of Craig’s arm. It sends a spasm of sensation through him, and his legs very nearly give way.

“You look sick.” Tweek tells him, and this makes Craig bark a cool, humourless laugh.

“Do I?”

“Yeah. God, please don’t be sick. Here.” He checks Craig’s temperature, and Craig wonders if he is as clammy as he feels. All of the blood in the upper half of his body is thumping in his groin, and his extremities feel cold and numb. So does his head.

Concern passes over Tweek’s face

“Maybe we should go upstairs.” He says, and Craig nods weakly, letting him empty the sink and offer his arm to help him up to his bedroom on the landing.

They get inside and close the door. And if the bedroom seemed small before it is _tiny_ now there are two almost fully grown men inside.

“Sit.” Tweek guides him carefully to the bed, but Craig doesn’t want to sit he wants to cling. He needs to cling. He wants feverish heat and the taste of his lips, and so in a moment of reckless abandon he coils his arms around Tweek’s neck and clutches him, pulls at his hair and clothes and almost starts crying at the way Tweek holds him a few cruel inches away.

“ _Craig,_ come on. Go to bed.”

And Tweek forces him into bed, and Craig has to double over on himself because of how much it hurts when he leaves him alone.

Does he know? Does he know he is doing this to him when he leaves him alone?

The night passes with waves of nausea that Craig suspects are not normal for someone who has a simple unrequited crush on a friend.

It’s a Thursday afternoon – gym class is always right before lunch, and Craig likes gym because it’s the only class he can fuck around with Clyde and Token for an hour without being assigned detention. Today though, he has a hard time enjoying it. The coach has them playing volleyball, and Tweek has been assigned a different team. He plays with the girls, looking like a dream with long legs and a baggy t-shirt, and Craig tries to see it in him as he moves and spikes and runs away from the squishy rubber ball. The reason. The thing inside him which relentlessly leads Craig on. Where does the magnetism come from? And where inside his beautiful form does his own thoughts or feelings toward Craig lie?

 Does he know that Craig is in love with him, and has been for what feels like all time?

It’s been awkward for the last few days. Too awkward for Craig to just ask. And Craig knows this more acutely than ever when Tweek looks up and catches him watching, and rather than pull a face at him he twitches his mouth into a tense little smile and looks away again, as though he is self-conscious. Embarrassed to be seen in a physical form. The fleeting eye contact they share has made Craig feel the same.

If only it was as simple as asking what was going on in his head.

Clyde throws a volleyball at Craig’s stomach, and it winds him. Stan has to drag the pair of them apart. Craig punches Clyde in the testicles, and he is assigned detention anyway. 

The class ends a few minutes before the bell, and while Token takes Clyde to the nurses office Craig is left to get changed with the others. He changes in the corner of the locker-room, with his back to everyone else, and he ignores Tweek passing behind him even though he can smell his skin and hair – like his shampoo and sweat – and hear the sound of his cell phone turning on when he goes to check his messages.

Craig takes forever. Everyone else leaves before he has even finished showering. He is towelling off when the bell for lunch finally rings, getting ready to pull on his t-shirt and jeans. After dressing and pulling a paddle brush quickly through his hair, he prepares to head to the cafeteria to sit. To eat his bag lunch and act like he isn’t dying inside if anyone looks at him. 

He jumps when he hears someone cough quietly behind him, because he had seriously thought that five minutes into lunch break, he would be in here alone. Far away, Craig can hear the sounds of excited students flooding the halls, but in the changing rooms the only sound is the fluorescent lights buzzing and the water pump rumbling slowly inside the walls.

“Jesus!”

It’s Tweek. Of course it’s Tweek. Sitting on the bench behind him like he doesn’t have anywhere else to be. Maybe he doesn’t.

“Want to eat lunch with me?” he asks, and Craig’s nods, dragging his backpack out of the locker and hitching it over his shoulder.

“Sure.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Sure.”

But Tweek looks at him like he knows he is lying, and Craig wants to tell him everything that’s wrong but he cannot. The words get lost and instead he just shrugs, and Tweek stands up so they are face to face, and all the awkward silences between them seem to come together and condense right here, in this moment.

“... Are you mad at me?” Tweek asks, and this time, Craig can’t find it in himself to deny it.

His breaking happens like a dam cracking, the sheer exhaustion and effort required to keep himself together finally becomes too much and the first fracture spreads through his restraint with such suddenness it leaves him stunned and short of breath. There is a second where maybe he thinks he might just be okay, a surreal, dizzy moment of shock that passes as soon as it arrives, and then he feels himself crumbling like a massive concrete wall coming down. Everything is lost, completely swept away, and all the weight of confusion want floods him with a desperation unlike anything he has ever experienced. He grabs Tweek by the shirt and kisses him, in a way that makes it clear he has never kissed anybody before.

It’s impossible to be sure, but Tweek is so startled he doesn’t push him off. In fact, after a few panicked moments of grasping at nothing, he begins kissing back, grabbing at Craig’s shoulders and waist and trying to push his bag off onto the ground

The backpack falls, and Craig clutches the other boys face as hands push up the back of his shirt and mount the long ridge of his spine. His leg is hitched over Tweek’s hip without even needing to think of it – the lockers are against his shoulders, cold metal through the cotton of his shirt.  The illusion of chastity falls away, and Craig forgets that he is a virgin humiliating himself in a high school gym locker room. He forgets that he is scared and horny, a teenager who doesn’t know where he stands, because he is feeling someone else’s tongue pressing against his and he is feeling breath from a foreign place in his lungs.

Tweek’s body feels beautiful – just as beautiful as Craig has dreamed, except it is a lot firmer and a lot heavier. His arms are strong, and Craig melts a little to clutch them, grinding against his partners hips when he realises he can feel his erection through his jeans.

This is too good, he thinks fleetingly, lips moving to explore the planes of his neck and jaw. It’s too good, and it’s happening too quickly, but at the same time its not happening fast enough. He wants so much more, so urgently, that he is filled with a fear it might stop as soon as it had started. With a desperate fervour he struggles to grope between their bodies and push his hands under the waistband of Tweek’s jeans.

The other boy gasps quietly, and braces himself against the locker as Craig squirms free. He slides down between the body against him and the metal on his back and invests all his efforts into ensuring jeans come undone easily. Behind the denim, Tweek is naked – something Craig probably could have guessed. He doesn’t question it, it barely even registers in his mind, because by far he is too busy noticing the dark blonde of his hair at the base of his length, and the way that when he finally curls his trembling hands around his cock Tweek whines softly – like he wants to keep going but knows they should probably stop.

Craig has always thought it would be very easy to suck a dick. He is euphoric to find that he isn’t wrong, although the experience hardly delivers what he expected either. He runs his tongue along the back, and observes with a shiver of pleasure that it tastes like nothing, but the skin is silky and soft. The tip slips between his lips with ease, and unaware of his limitations he tries and fails to swallow all of it in one go. Tweek’s fingers grasp at his hair in surprise, and push him back when he chokes. Eyes watering with pain and shame, he rubs his mouth messily on the back of his hand.

“Please don’t die.” Tweek whispers to him, and his voice is hushed like he is worried people might hear but pitched with excitement and a quiver like the quiver in his upper leg, tense below Craig’s palm. It’s odd to look up at him from this angle. To see his face illuminated from above. Craig feels very small, and very vulnerable. He nods, thinking that would be hard for him to explain to the paramedics and probably quite anti-climactic, and tries again. He reminds himself he has to breathe. He reminds himself not to try and jam it down his throat in one go like the two of them are starring in a porn video. He presses the head of Tweek’s cock against his mouth and closes his eyes.

This is real. It doesn’t feel real, but it is. It feels like the hazy heat of late summer evenings, and that confusing moment that comes after waking from a nap. It feels like brief seconds of eye contact in a classroom, an unacknowledged smile, and most of all it feels like those countless, exhilarating momentsTweek’s hand touches his by accident. He feels it like it’s too good to be true - like he might loose it any second. Every move he makes feels like it belongs to someone else. Someone better. Someone more deserving of Tweek than him. And yet the weight of cock on his tongue is real. Real in his belly and in his bones. The erection straining the crotch of his jeans is real too, and so is the ache of the concrete underneath his knees. He lays kisses along the back of Tweek’s length, and when his nose presses against smooth belly and soft, ticklish hair he knows that _he_ is real too. The way he smells is strange, but beautiful. Freshly showered, but intensely human. He smells fleshy, and he smells foreign, and he smells warm.

Tweek moans quietly and lets his forehead fall against the lockers behind them. Craig hears his nails on the metal, and feels his stomach tense beneath his hands. His precome drips against Craig’s cheek as he mouths the base of his cock, and Craig buries his burning face below his navel to listen for the little gasp of bliss this incurs. Not much longer now, and it will be over. Only a few more moments of gentle sucking and breathless whines, and achingly Craig presses his spare hand between his own legs in desperation.

It feels good. A simple, obvious fact. And letting out a little whimper of his own he tries to suck as much dick as he can into his mouth again, working what he cannot fit with his palm.

“Oh _Jesus,_ Craig…”

Tweek cards a hand through his hair, pressing his fingers at the back of Craig’s neck and guiding him further down. Each fraction of an inch feels impossible, but somehow Craig manages to keep taking more, and soon his mouth is overflowing with spit and precome. His shoulders are trembling with tension as he wills it to be over. Once it’s over, there might be freedom from this nebulous and inconsistent feeling between them – an exit from the unspoken place, the thing which defies reason and explanation and no matter how many sleepless nights Craig spent thinking, he was never able to give the thing a name.

Tweek’s body trembles when he comes, his voice shuddering with the release passing up his back, and Craig feels his own cock throb in sympathy, begging for stimulation beyond the pressure of his palm through his jeans. The taste on his tongue is foreign, but inoffensive, although the consistency and warmth of it makes him gag so he has to pull back. He sits with his head against Tweek’s belly panting, his pulse hammering onside his ears, and feels come spilling between his lips and dripping lazily over his jaw.

Tweek doesn’t stop shivering, and his hand doesn’t move from the crown of Craig’s head. It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking because Craig can’t see his face. He is distracted. He is kneading at his crotch and wishing he could just ask for a favour. Beg for him to help him finish without having to find the words.

“Stand up.” Tweek murmurs, after a moment to pull himself together. “Kiss me.”

Craig can’t do it. He feels too weak in his kegs. He shakes his head and tries to wipe his face. The wetness of his spit and come seems to be everywhere now – Craig cant for the life of him figure out how.

“Craig?”

Tweek’s jeans creak as he crouches down, and he almost looses his balance, struggling to tuck away his dick (still half-hard) and correct the situation with his fly.

“… Are you okay?”

His eyes are green like lily pads, and his cheeks look smooth like fresh cold cream. Craig can’t look at him, too embarrassed and too broken, and he cannot wrap his mind about what might be wrong. He tries to lie and nod his head, but he ends up shaking it instead. Tweek bites his lip in worry, and it looks good on him. Like everything always looks good on him.

“What do I say?” he asks, his voice unsteady. “Can I do anything?”

They are alone, the two of them, in the changing rooms on a Thursday afternoon. The space smells like sweat and deep heat cream, and overhead the fluorescent lights keep buzzing so that Craig’s whole head is thick with it. His eyes sore from straining, so he closes them.

 “Don’t worry” His voice says, without his instruction. “It’s okay. What else is a boyfriend good for?”

But maybe it would have been better if he didn’t say anything at all.


	4. Never watch cartoons because cartoons are for children and naughty children always go to hell.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be a valentines day fic but that never happened i guess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SFW, Mentions of prior filth, 'domestic bliss', angst and comfort kinda idk, slice of life

_"The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your ‘soul mate’ you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation."_

_— Monica Drake, Clown Girl_

 

 

The alarm goes off at six thirty am, but Craig lies in bed a few minutes longer than usual because it takes him a moment to remember where he is and what it is, exactly, that he’s doing there. There is no wall beside him, nothing solid against the edge of the mattress boxing him in, and the drizzling rain outside means that there is no light bleeding under the curtains and illuminating the rubbish bags and suitcases cluttering the strange little room.

On the other side of the mattress his company is still snoring, and under the weight of a new feather duvet Craig’s aching body is reluctant to move even a millimetre. He misses sleep. He misses the unthinking silence and the subconscious bliss of a warm bed.

He wishes he could just roll over and return to his dreams.

The bedsprings groan beneath him as he sits up, and with robotic jerkiness he gropes in the dark for the hoodie he had tossed on the bedpost the night before. It’s cold beyond the security of blankets, and the bare floorboards are icy when he steps out of bed. He perseveres with pulling the hoodie over his head anyway, tip-toeing awkwardly towards the spot he had left his slippers on the floor.

He glances over his shoulder as he leaves the room, making sure the man in the bed is still sleeping, and the fact that he hasn’t moved an inch makes Craig feel unhappy, and maybe a bit emotionally distanced from him. With a heavy sigh he closes the door, and attempts to locate the hallway light switch with both his hands.

The switch, when he finds it, is at least four inches lower than he is accustomed to. The bright light bleaches his vision momentarily when he flicks it on, and disorientated he tries to remember where the linen cupboard is. He should know this, because just yesterday he spent all morning filling it with towels.

He finds it eventually, next to the door to the spare room, and pulling the first towel on the stack out he shuffles into the unfamiliar bathroom, dumping it onto the toilet cistern and closing the door.

He feels a little better after a shower. The hot water cleans away the filmy sweaty feeling of sleep, and eases the soreness cradled in the small of his back. He feels bruised and tender all over, and a little bit weighted down by his own body. He thinks this may or may not be related to his activities the night before.

When he finally steps out from under the jet of hot water and steam, he feels a little more functional, despite his odd mood remaining unchanged. He towels off, and brushes his braces, and when he wipes down the foggy bathroom mirror to check his face he sees that it’s still exactly the same as it was yesterday. Exactly the same as it has been his whole life up until right now. His nose is too skinny and his eyelashes are too long. He has brown eyes, and a proliferation of freckles all over.

He leans close enough to inspect the blackheads on his chin, and his breath fogs up the mirror glass again.

Nothing unusual, and nothing out of place. Maybe he looks a little more tired than he used to. Maybe he is starting to get a small crease etched prematurely between his eyebrows. All of these things are slow to develop, however, becoming more and more obvious by fractions every day. He doesn’t notice either of them this morning. He may not notice either of them for a long time.

He dresses and shuffles out the door, orientating himself toward the kitchen, down the hall.

The kitchen is spacious, and boasts a wide window overlooking the east of the city. Their apartment is high enough up that the last glittering lights of the night skyline are visible on the horizon when he arrives, and in the dull grey dawn light that filters through the drizzle Craig is able to fill the stovetop espresso maker and set it on the element to boil. He procures the box of Lucky Charms from the cupboard beneath the sink with some difficulty – his ability to bend is compromised by the ache in his back – and empties half the box into a bowl from the drying rack by the sink. They only have skinny milk, so he tops off his cereal with that before making his way mechanically toward the sofa in the lounge room. The same sofa He and Tweek had purchased from a furniture store a week ago with most of Tweek’s savings from the tip jar.  
Only once he is sitting down does he realise he doesn’t have a spoon, so he gets up to retrieve one just as he hears floorboards creaking down the hall.

“… Craig?”

“Who else?”

Tweek pads into the kitchen wearing boxer briefs and a t-shirt that says _Houston_ _, I have so many problems._ He borrowed it from Craig a while ago and never gave it back. He looks a little bewildered, to be standing there barefoot in their kitchen at seven am, and as Craig opens the cutlery drawer and procures his spoon he watches silently, rubbing the dust of sleep from his eyes.

“You’re moving like a robot.” He mumbles, as Craig shuffles past, and this registers as humorous to Craig in some part of himself that is only just stirring from rest. He grunts in acknowledgement of the observation and returns to the sofa, crawling over the back with significant difficulty and regretting the heavy landing on his ass.

Behind him in the kitchen, the espresso maker is boiling, and he can hear the sound of Tweek clattering around for a mug into which he might pour its bounty. Craig digs around in the back of the sofa for the remote, before remembering he isn’t in his parent’s house and that therefore, the remote has probably not been displaced by the inconsiderations of his heathen family. He finds it exactly where Tweek had left it yesterday, next to the statue of the Buddha and a ramekin holding a French pear scented votive candle, and switches on their conservatively sized but top-of-the-line TV

“Are you okay?” Tweek appears beside him, leaning over the back of the sofa to offer him a sweet, milky mug of coffee. Craig declines, having not even started his Lucky Charms yet, and indicates that Tweek should put the mug down on the coffee table instead.

“No,” He says, and then he realises that might have been misleading. “I mean, Yes, but I dunno. I just… ugh.” 

He shakes his head, hoping Tweek won’t press him to talk about it, and brings up the digital TV menu. Although they do have Netflix, and hulu, and plenty of other subscriptions besides, Craig doesn’t get the same feeling watching these as he does watching cartoons on network or cable. The ads for toys and high sugar cereals, and the bright animations at the bottom of the screen advertising movies and shows for children, add a very specific something to _Ben Ten_ on a miserable Saturday morning. He most likely couldn’t explain this phenomena if he was asked to, and he hopes as he selects one of the kids channels that Tweek will accept his decision without asking why.

“… Did I do something wrong?”

Tweek seems too distracted to quiz him about his TV habits anyway. It’s comforting to know he’s so concerned about his role in Craig’s wellbeing, and despite the peculiar feeling settling in him today Craig is relieved that his feelings of affection for his companion have not waivered overnight. He shakes his head and looks down into his breakfast, trying to make out the marshmallows drifting in milk and wheat and that fine orangey dust that always floats on the top of a bowl of cereal.

“No. I just feel kinda weird today. It’s nothing.”

“Weird in what way?”

“An unusual way, I guess.”

Craig turns his face, to address the other man directly, and it when he does he feels a distinct wave of relief pass through him. Tweek looks just the same as he always did as well. His hair is an artful mess, his lips are chapped from being bitten, and as always his brows are furrowed; in worry or in annoyance or in thought.

“… Why do you feel weird?” he asks tentatively, his voice almost drowned out by the opening credits of the TV show playing at the time.

Craig shrugs, and goes back to combing his cereal. After a moment or two of consideration, Tweek sighs and gives up on pressuring him. He reaches over the sofa back to place Craig’s coffee on the table, before erecting himself and returning to the kitchen.

He comes back two minutes later, with his own steaming cup of straight black. By this time, Craig has nearly finished his cereal, sucking the spoon as he watches the setup of the episode wrap up. Or at least, his eyes are watching. His mind is actually recalling Saturday mornings watching Pokémon with his sister, and eating straight out of the cereal box unhindered, and the way that at ten am his mother would come downstairs and scold him because he wasn’t actually allowed to eat Capt’n Crunch straight out of the box.

Tweek drops into the seat beside him, and beneath their weight the brand new sofa creaks. The noise is reminiscent of the noise a box spring makes when compressed. A sound Craig has become quite familiar with in recent hours.

He coughs uncomfortably, setting his empty cereal bowl down on the coffee table. He tries to concentrate on the TV as much as possible, but for some reason even the comforting babble of cartoon sound effects can’t distract him from the closeness of the other body beside him. After fifteen minutes of rigid silence, Craig starts to suspect that Tweek is beginning to pick up on the awkwardness too.

Oh boy.

In almost fifteen years, Craig hasn’t had an awkward moment alone with Tweek. Now though, here they are, unable to say even a single word to each other in case they might break the illusion of familiarity between them.

It seems painful. Unbelievable and frustrating. And Craig wishes he could say something to make it okay but nothing, not a _single_ measly solution, comes to mind.

The problem is probably in the details of their situation, he decides. In the way that he is too aware of the soreness in his lower body, and the way that the rising daylight soon illuminates the heart shaped bruises on Tweek’s neck. It’s in the colour of the sofa, which they had chosen as a couple, and in the pristine, unchipped porcelain of Craig’s cereal bowl. The table set had been a gift from Craig’s grandmother, and the TV a gift from Tweeks aunt - these items were reminders that all around them are shiny new things, and shiny new things were the kind of things that two twenty six year old men probably shouldn’t own. Particularly considering that all around them are large gaps, where the things that they _should_ possess (Regrets? Ex-lovers? Memories of previous heatbreak?) remain absent.

Maybe they shouldn’t have done this after all.

The episode of _Ben Ten_ ends without Craig noticing. An episode of _Scooby-Doo_ soon begins. Craig’s fingers wander over his knuckles as his mind wanders over his feelings, and soon they find the silver band resting heavy and unfamiliar on his ring finger.  He pauses for a moment, examining the metal on his skin, and a sudden sense of disbelief passes over him.

This is real.

This is really real.

How had it all unfolded again? He can hardly remember, and if he was to try to piece it together he isn’t even sure it will make sense.

All he knows is that somehow, one thing had lead right into to another, and that somehow everything had happened so slow that it all felt natural and beyond question. Now, there is nothing but stillness in a strange house, a morning spent next to someone he had always assumed he loved but had never actually wondered why or how.

This isn’t supposed to happen just yet, is it?

He is still just a child, curled up on the sofa watching cartoons. And yet somehow he is fully grown and legally bound, to a person who is just as caught up in the slip stream of life and death and rites of passage as he is. Without sound and without struggle, all of this has happened because somehow, along the separate lines of their lives, the pair of them had collided and neither had been able to let the other go.

Craig’s cereal isn’t sitting so well in his stomach any more. He swallows the lump in his throat and covers his mouth discretely with his hand. Beside him, Tweek clears his throat, and the weight of their decisions make the air feel heavy and too thick to say anything in. They are drowning in the ocean of silence, under a nauseating wave of years ahead of them. They alone with each other. Alone with themselves. Two bodies isolated in their shared home.

“… Craig?”

“Mm…”

“Are you going to drink your coffee?”

Craig supposes he should.

The drink is lukewarm when he holds it, and milky and sweet on his tongue. Tweek always makes him coffees like he likes them, despite believing that the addition of milk and sugar in a hot drink is an abomination. He nurses he beverage with his eyes on the TV, the bright colours and happy sounds touching him in a way that seems ageless, even though he knows he is far too old to be taken in by any of them.

Too young to be married, maybe. But at the same time far too old.

Or, he tries to tell himself, running his tongue tersely over the backs of his teeth, maybe not.

He didn’t feel too young at the altar. And he didn’t feel too young last night. Regardless of how old he was, Craig Tucker always just feels like himself. A guy from a small town in Colorado. Working at a community college tutoring high school students in physics. He has adult braces and a boyfriend, who likes coffee and books by Dan Brown, and for the sake of his own wellbeing the boy probably shouldn’t have access to either. The two of them had always talked about having a house together. A pet rabbit that walked around the house unfettered and used a litter box like it was a cat. Things like that had always seemed like jokes when they came up in conversation, but perhaps in retrospect they were the kind of jokes which concealed partial truth. Although attempting to piece together the way that sitting in a mall pretending to argue about towel co-ordinates for the amusement of friends had somehow became sitting on a sofa in an apartment with both their names on the mortgage was impossible. Just like it was impossible to plot the course of any life outside of the moments which compose it.

He drains the last of his coffee and replaces the mug on the table. _Scooby-Doo_ is finishing, and next to him Tweek is twisting his hair around his fingers fretfully, like he has something to say but is too scared to say it out loud.

“Are you mad at me?” he manages eventually, his efforts at sounding nonchalant making him sound wooden and distressed instead. Craig shakes his head, a little hurt that Tweek would jump to that conclusion.

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“I dunno. I’m just kinda worried that maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

Maybe they shouldn’t have waited so long? Maybe they should have just fucked when they were young and got it over with? But then, Craig thinks, if they had done that, then maybe he never would have convinced himself that he loved this boy enough to marry him. Maybe he would have lost interest, or even worse _Tweek_ might have lost interest in him. Maybe without that shy anticipation, that great and nebulous promise that they would feel different after signing a piece of paper and tumbling into one another’s arms, nothing ever would have happened and they would still be holding hands like shy school kids, chaste and wholesome and choking on lies.

Craig had thought about Tweek fucking him a million times. But just like the idea of owning a house together, and having a pet, and being ‘in love’, it was much more comfortable to act like he was only joking. There had never been anyone closer in Craig’s life, after all. For fifteen years they had been happy feigning innocence, and doubting that there would ever be a time where their relationship transcended the intensely, dizzyingly, intimately platonic.

 “… Maybe I wasn’t very good.” Tweek responds, after a few seconds of tentative silence. “Last night I mean. You know?”

Oh.

No.

God no.

Embarrassed, Craig shakes his head, dropping his eyes from the TV screen down to the lounge room floor.

“No. You were fine.”

Honestly he had gotten what he had expected. Moments of pleasure, and moments of pain, but mostly just moments of clumsiness and unfortunate self-consciousness, and mixed up regrets that they hadn’t practiced even though practice was no way to guarantee that either of them could predict what was in store for them.

Craig never could have imagined what it felt like, to be standing in front of a church full of people and facing the same person he had loved for what felt like his whole entire life. Mostly in the sense that it didn’t feel like anything at all _._ Even though he had a marriage certificate, and memories of butterflies in his stomach when Tweek kissed him, and bruises on his hips from where Tweek held him last night, he still feels exactly the same.

More vulnerable, maybe. More exposed emotionally than he ever had before. But otherwise he sill feels like Craig.

He still feels like Craig.

And the boy on the sofa beside him is still Tweek.

And there is nothing on earth that might have stopped them from carrying on the way they always had.

“Just fine?” he asks, and Craig nods.

“We need to practice more,” he suggests, “It was kinda hard to know exactly what we were doing. But that’s really not something that’s bothering me right now.”

“Okay? So what is?”

Craig bites his lip, trying to figure out what the new cartoon on the TV is, and why he had never seen it before. Outside, a distant rumble of thunder rolls over the episode soundtrack. For the first time, Craig is aware of the fact he is warm. Physically comfortable, if unnerved, and warm.

“I still feel the same.” He admits quietly. “I dunno. I thought it would feel different. But instead somehow I’m sitting here and I still feel exactly the same.”

The same and confused. The same and lost. He doesn’t feel old, or young, or anything – he feels like himself in differant house, wearing the same pyjamas and still a whole lifetime short of waking up one day and feeling the adult he thought he would become. Was that all he was ever going to feel like? Himself? Or would he manage to die some day, understanding fully everything that had happened in his lifetime to carry him to this place? Would he ever be able to say that now, he had truly reached the place he had expected to be?

Probably not. Every time he checks, he thinks the milestones have shifted, and he still felt like himself in the mirror no matter what is happening inside his head.

At least, if that’s the case, he can take comfort in knowing that Tweek will always be the same neurotic teenaged boy he accidentally fell in love with all those years ago. Falling for him had been a process so gradual it was like it wasn’t even happening at all.

Tweek shrugs and tucks a lock of uncombed hair back, behind his ear. Doing so draws even more attention to the bitemarks on his throat, and Craig’s stomach turns over in like it had the previous evening, when Tweek picked him up and dropped him into the duvets that covered their fancy new bed. It had been a strange night. But not a bad one. And it wasn’t like they didn’t have years ahead of them to get it right.

“I do too.” Tweek tells him, as matter-of-factly as he can. “I mean, I’m kinda tired but mostly. Eh.” He scratches the back of his neck uncomfortably. Craig watches the way the muscles in his arms move, and the way his hair spills over his shoulder in a river of dusty gold.

God, he is beautiful. How did a guy like that fall in love with a guy like Craig?

Craig must have stopped a war in a past life, to deserve someone like him in this one.

“I’m not sure you’re supposed to feel different.” Tweek continued, after a moment of extended silence passed them by. “Are you? Am I doing something wrong maybe?”

Craig realises that thanks to him, Tweek is starting to question himself. He should probably put a stop to that as soon as possible. He sighs and reaches out a hand, laying it on his lovers ( _Husbands)_ shoulder and grooming the tips of his hair.

“I guess not.” He says, letting the sound of the TV fade into the background like the rain.  “But if I start feeling anything revolutionary, I guess you will be the first to know.”

Tweek nods, and gives him a sheepish little smile.

“Good. ‘Cause I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but I am pretty sure I love y-“

“I know.”

Craig cuts him off, drawing back his hand and rubbing it against his cheeks like it would hide the sudden flush rising in them. “Same. I mean. Yeah. You know… same goes.”

This makes Tweek snigger, and after allowing himself a few seconds to be mortified Craig feels a little smile of amusement turn the corners of his lips too. It would seem he is fourteen again, too scared to admit his honest to god feelings. The sound of the cartoons comes rushing back, and his mouth has that lingering Sugar-Cereal taste that had characterised so many childhood mornings.

“Let’s go get lunch today,” Tweek suggests, after he is finished laughing. “Maybe at a café? We should probably buy a vacuum cleaner.”

“Yeah, there’s that bed bath and beyond voucher your cousin gave us.” Craig’s eyes flicker from his companion, to his surroundings, and the naked potential in the bare, clean walls. A few photos might look nice there, next to the window. His degree would look awesome in a frame on the hallway wall. They could draw pictures on the windows in pastel chalk markers, and pick pot plants for the kitchen from the garden store. Craig even thought fleetingly, with a flicker of excitement, of a basket by the fireplace, complete with a rabbit or some other fuzzy, friendly animal.

But that is a conversation for another day.

“Okay.” He says for now, settling back into the sofa and bringing his feet up, to rest in Tweek’s lap. “But I think we should finish watching this first. I am slowly starting to become invested.”

Funny, he was pretty sure he’d said something like that before.

Last time he said that, he had fallen in love. So gradually it was like it wasn’t even happening at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would just like to point out that, while poetic, the quote at the beginning of this story is factually inaccurate. 
> 
> That is all.

**Author's Note:**

> hahahAHAHA I warned u


End file.
